to fantastic politics in the hard and strenuous north. Even if
Evesham did force the world back to war, what was that to me? I was a
man, with the heart of a man, and why should I feel the responsibility
of a deity for the way the world might go?

"You know that is not quite the way I think about affairs, about my real
affairs. I am a solicitor, you know, with a point of view.

"The vision was so real, you must understand, so utterly unlike a dream
that I kept perpetually recalling little irrelevant details; even the
ornament of a book-cover that lay on my wife's sewing-machine in the
breakfast-room recalled with the utmost vividness the gilt line that ran
about the seat in the alcove where I had talked with the messenger from
my deserted party. Have you ever heard of a dream that had a quality
like that?"

"Like--?"

"So that afterwards you remembered little details you had forgotten."

I thought. I had never noticed the point before, but he was right.

"Never," I said. "That is what you never seem to do with dreams."

"No," he answered. "But that is just what I did. I am a solicitor, you
must understand, in Liverpool, and I could not help wondering what the
clients and business people I found myself talking to in my office would
think if I told them suddenly I was in love with a girl who would
be born a couple of hundred years or so hence, and worried about the
politics of my great-great-great-grandchildren. I was chiefly busy that
day negotiating a ninety-nine-year building lease. It was a private
builder in a hurry, and we wanted to tie him in every possible way. I
had an interview with him, and he showed a certain want of temper that
sent me to bed still irritated. That night I had no dream. Nor did I
dream the next night, at least, to remember.

"Something of that intense reality of conviction vanished. I began to
feel sure it WAS a dream. And then it came again.

"When the dream came again, nearly four days later, it was very
different. I think it certain that four days had also elapsed in the
dream. Many things had happened in the north, and the shadow of them was
back again between us, and this time it was not so easily dispelled.
I began, I know, with moody musings. Why, in spite of all, should I go
back, go back for all the rest of my days to toil and stress, insults
and perpetual dissatisfaction, simply to save hundreds of millions of
common people, whom I did not love, whom too often I could do no